Bug#865721: openarena: Please add platform support for m68k

[Simon McVittie]

On Sat, 24 Jun 2017 at 08:45:17 +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> This is trivially fixed by the attached patch. Please consinder including
> it. I will also send a pull request upstream to get it fixed there as
> well.

Instead of hard-coding yet more architectures, I'd prefer to submit the
equivalent of https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3/pull/129 to OpenArena.
Please tell this bug if you get there before I do. I sent the equivalent
of that pull request to the ioquake3, iortcw and OpenJK game engines,
but forgot to send a copy for the OpenArena game-code, which is what's
in Debian's src:openarena.

> openarena currently fails to build from source on m68k because
> this architecture is not known within code/qcommon/q_platform.h

Has the game resulting from this change been tested and demonstrated
to work?

I would very much prefer not to hard-code explicit support for particular
architectures without some demonstration that the architecture does,
in fact, work. If the build system is just running `uname -m` and hoping
for the best, that doesn't make any particular statement about whether
the result is functional on particular CPUs; but if the build system
explicitly mentions __m68k__, that looks uncomfortably like a statement
that it is known to work on m68k, which seems misleading if nobody has
actually tried it.

I find it hard to believe that OpenArena is particularly useful on
m68k. OpenArena uses the idTech3 engine from Quake III Arena (which
needed up-to-date PC hardware with 3D acceleration circa 1999), and has a
general technical direction of allowing larger textures / higher polygon
counts than Quake III Arena itself. According to Wikipedia, m68k reached
EOL in 1994. Is there any m68k hardware with enough performance and RAM
capacity to actually run the idTech3 engine and achieve multiple frames
per second?

I'd suggest building only the dedicated server part, which needs less
CPU/RAM and does not use or need 3D acceleration... but I'm finding it
hard to imagine why anyone would choose to run their OpenArena dedicated
server on m68k rather than on, for example, Debian armel or Raspbian
armhf on a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero? (Or, more likely, a spare PC.)

If dpkg supported marking packages as "Architecture: !m68k !powerpcspe"
I'd consider doing that, but to the best of my knowledge it doesn't. If
you don't want this game failing to build from source and messing up your
percentage-built statistics, perhaps listing it as Not-For-Us would be
a useful approach?

Regards,
    S